Flash Is Now SEO Friendly? Hurray!

Adobe announced last night that they are providing "optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines." Can you hear every Web designer from Atlanta to Alaska cheering?

The development will offer Yahoo! and Google the ability to provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs (rich internet applications) and other dynamic content (like Flash menu's) that run in Adobe Flash Player. Developers and rich Web content producers need not amend existing and future content with flat (text) files in order to make it searchable - a previously difficult task due to the changing state states, an inherent problem in RIA technologies.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

Google has already begun rolling out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Spoken like a true SEO! While it might be "limited" as you suggest, it remains an important development that content in Flash is no longer siloed as it has been in the past. It's only going to get better for flash designers.

05-12-2009 8:04 AM

Google now indexes Flash… but should you create an all flash site? Last month Google rolled out